Areas of Expertise:

Lucas Carlson founded AppFog, a PaaS company that leveraged Cloud Foundry and was acquired by CenturyLink. Lucas has been a professional developer for over 10 years and specializes in Ruby on Rails development. Lucas has authored Programming for PaaS and the Ruby Cookbook and has written half a dozen libraries in various programming languages and contributed to many others, including Rails and RedCloth. He maintains a personal website at lucascarlson.net.

"It is not an introductory book for Ruby and honestly I used the references given in the book to start with Ruby, because I didn't know anything of the language. Later on, when I got some feeling about the language, I started to enjoy the book, because it is giving a lot of information in the discussions that goes widely over the initial given problem for understanding more of its philosophy. It's a big book, but it is also giving a lot of recipes to real-world problems. If I'm going to program something in Ruby, I will search a good starting point recipe, that will give me a hint to a good solution of the problems I'll encounter. I would recommend the book to everyone who programs in Ruby."
--Bart Vrancken, JavaLobby

"I was tempted to think I wasn't ready for this book yet, as I don't have a firm Ruby foundation. But I'm glad I ignored that thought. For a beginner, this is a wealth of real code that does things that you will need to do in all your programs. String manipulation, number and date processing, etc. Those are the things that are fairly simple when you have experience, but stumbling blocks when you have to think about every step you take. For the intermediate and experienced coder, you'll find more advanced techniques like web services or multithreading your programs. In both cases (beginner or expert), a book like this will start to seed your imagination. Scanning through the recipes, you're sure to have one of those "ooohh... I didn't think about doing *that*!" moments."
--Thomas Duff, Duffbert's Random Musings

"Here is the definitive book on implementing Ruby, covering such important topics as strings and numbers, arrays and hashes, databases, graphics, and multitasking. The authors have put together an incredible collection of ready-to-use solutions, clearly documented, with all necessary code. Programmers can get a head start by simply dropping code from the book into their work."
--Michael Kleper, The Kleper Report on Digital Publishing